Penn State Football: Urschel Named Senior CLASS Award Recipient

Penn State’s John Urschel has racked up awards for his play on field and in the classroom all season, but this one may be the biggest yet. Urschel was named the senior CLASS Award winner on Monday, the first Penn State football player to have done so.

The award, chosen by a nationwide vote of Division I FBS football coaches, national football media and fans, is given annually to the most outstanding senior student-athlete in Division I football. 

“I am honored and grateful to have been selected the Senior CLASS Award recipient,” Urschel said of the announcement. “I have tried to represent my team, university and family as best possible during my time at Penn State. I am very appreciative and thank my family, professors, coaches, teammates and friends for all their support and help they have provided with all my academic and football pursuits at Penn State.”

A two-time first-team All-Big Ten honoree, Urschel also became the first Penn State student-athlete to win the Campbell Trophy. The award bestowed up the nation’s premier college football Scholar-Athlete and presented annually at the National Football Foundation Dinner since 1990.

“John Urschel epitomizes what a Penn State student-athlete is all about,” Penn State head coach Bill O’Brien said. “He has maximized his opportunities at Penn State by working extremely hard to become a fantastic student and football player who will continue to achieve great things in the next chapter of his life.”

Urschel has taught a section of Math 232 – Integral Vector Calculus – this semester on the University Park campus, in addition to his academic and football responsibilities. He taught a section of Math 041 – Trigonometry and Analytic Geometry – during the 2013 spring semester. Urschel has participated in the Penn State Lift for Life, THON events, the Relay for Life and the Special Olympics Pennsylvania State Summer Games during his collegiate career.
 
A paper written by Urschel titled, “Instabilities of the Sun-Jupiter-Asteroid Three Body Problem” was published in 2012 in the journal, Celestial Mechanics and Dynamic Astronomy. He has a second paper accepted for publication, “A Space-Time Multigrid Method for the Numerical Valuation of Barrier Options” in the journal, Communications in Mathematical Finance, and has written two additional papers that will be submitted soon for consideration to be published.